By Water & Blood

Letter to Sporacius

Of the blessed Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus: A Compendium of Heretical Fable-Making.

To the most magnificent and most glorious master, and Christ-loving son, Sporacius, Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus in Augustoeuphratensis, greeting in the Lord.

The aim of your Magnificence is praiseworthy. For you desire to learn the paths that certain people have newly cut on either side of the straight road—paths whose end is the pit of destruction. You have taken up this desire not so that you might listen to myths that have been shaped most wickedly and that give off a foul smell, but so that you may teach those who are ignorant which is the royal highway, adorned with the footprints of the apostles and the prophets and having as its end the kingdom of the heavens, and which are the tracks of the heretics, which bring the final ruin upon those who walk in them.

The aim, then, as I said, is excellent and worthy of admiration. Yet your God-loving soul must know that most of the ancient heresies have been extinguished through the divine grace, and have become, to speak prophetically, like grass on housetops, which withered before it blossomed. And perhaps someone might blame us for bringing back into the light of memory things that have been handed over to the gloom of forgetfulness. Besides this, the nonsense of the myths is great, and the magnitude of the blasphemy dared against God is unspeakable for tongues trained to be pious; and as for the lust both legislated among them and practiced, not even one of those reared on the stage would endure either to describe it or to hear others describing it—so far does it leave behind even the notorious workers of licentiousness.

But since the pollution of these all-defiled doctrines, when stripped bare, makes both those who have impiously begotten them and those who have senselessly believed them more abominable, I will gladly take up the labor, looking to the gain. I will try as far as possible to cut short the idle talk of the myths, to pass over the greatest of the blasphemies, and to leap over the pollution of the most licentious and most foul rites.

We shall divide the composition, God willing, into five books. The first will receive the account of those myths whose fathers invented another craftsman of creation; denying the one beginning of all things, they supposed other beginnings that do not exist, and said that the Lord appeared to human beings in seeming only. Of these doctrines the first inventor was Simon the Magus the Samaritan, and the last Manes the sorcerer the Persian. The second will exhibit those who practiced the opposite of these: who confessed that there is one beginning of all things, yet called the Lord a mere man. Of this heresy Ebion was the founder, and it received various inventions up to Marcellus and Photinus. The third will make clear those who sprang up between these and those, who became fathers of various doctrines. In the fourth we shall exhibit the newer heresies—that of Arius, I mean, and of Eunomius, and as many as grew up after those, as far as this last one, which the Master suddenly pulled up by the roots.

In these four books, then, we shall lay bare the many-branched error of the heresies. But so that we may also wipe clean the tongues of those who will read and the ears of those who will hear, and free them from the pestilential stench, we shall bring forward, like some Chalastrian soda and fragrant myrrh, the truth of the evangelical doctrines, and show that every heresy is an adversary of the teaching of the divine oracles.

As for the myths of the ancient heresies, I have collected them from the ancient teachers of the Church: Justin the philosopher and martyr; Irenaeus, who both cultivated and enlightened the Celtic nations; Clement, who is surnamed Stromateus; Origen; Eusebius, both the Palestinian and the Phoenician; Adamantius; Rhodon; Titus; Diodorus; George; and the others who armed their tongues against the lie. And what those men wrote scattered I shall arrange in order; what they said at length I shall say briefly. For I have not undertaken for the present to argue against them—since I have already drawn up in writing against those that still stand even now—but I was ordered to exhibit the difference of their myths themselves.

The name for the gathering of the foul heresies is A Compendium of Heretical Fable-Making; for the teaching of the truth, A Compendium of Divine Doctrines; and common to both of these, A Discrimination of Falsehood and Truth. I urge those who will meet with this that they examine each of the heretical doctrines side by side with the teaching of the truth; for it was for this very reason that I also wrote the fifth book. For one will see that this follows the oracles of the divine Spirit, while those are inventions of a thoroughly evil mind. And let the one who clearly finds the strength of the truth in another’s labors repay with prayers both the one who has labored and the one who asked for the composition—because, though he uses a cloak and a belt, and has been entrusted with a military command, and is compelled by that office to attend upon the palace, he prefers to all things together the knowledge of divine things and the learning of the truth, and cries out with the prophet: “How I have loved your law, O Lord! All the day it is my meditation.”